Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  Given the quality of Brian’s books, if we had indeed given them big solo ads in big-circulation newspapers, and done it often enough, we would no doubt have made him as famous as Greene. But a) it would have taken quite a long time to work, b) all our other writers would meanwhile be going into conniptions, and c) we could not afford it. Or so André was convinced. And in André Deutsch Limited no one but André Deutsch himself had a hope in hell of deciding how much money was to be spent on what. When André dismissed the idea of shifting the advertising of Brian’s work into the big-time category as nonsense, all I could do – all, I must admit, I ever dreamt of doing – was convey his opinion to Brian in less brutal words. And up to the publication of The Emperor of Ice Cream in 1966 Brian did no more than mutter from time to time, and then appear to forget it.

  Not long after that publication I went to New York for the firm, saw the Moores as usual, and was invited by them to spend a few days in Amagansett. The misery of New York in a heatwave gives those easygoing Long Island seaside towns great charm: their tree-shaded streets, their shingled houses set back from the streets and far apart, among more trees – how pretty and restful they are! The English pride themselves on having evolved in the eighteenth century a perfect domestic architecture, but I think the Americans beat them at it with the unpretentious, graceful, welcoming wooden houses that are so respectfully and unpompously preserved in New England. The house rented by the Moores was not particularly distinguished, but the moment you were through the front door you were comfortable in it – and ‘comfortable’ was the word for Amagansett as a whole. It has (or had then) a life of its own apart from accommodating summer visitors, although that was what it chiefly did; and it wasn’t smart. Its regular visitors insisted a little too much on how they preferred it to the snobby Hamptons, where the vast country retreats of the robber barons still stood, and where the big money still tended to go; but I thought Amagansett really did deserve preference. It was favoured by writers and medical people, particularly psychiatrists. When I arrived this time Brian and Jackie were full of a party ending with a moonlit swim, during which four or five drunk psychiatrists had been so relaxed and happy that, as they bobbed about in the sea, they had confided in each other their most intimate secrets: which were not, as ordinary people’s might have been, what they did in bed, but how much they earned.

  I was not the Moores’ only guest. They had become friends with a couple whom I had met a year or so before, and liked: Franklin Russell, who wrote good and successful nature books, and his very attractive Canadian wife Jean, who was an actress – a good one according to the Moores, although she found it impossible to get parts in New York because Americans never took Canadians seriously. Frank was travelling in some inhospitable place for one of his books, so Jean needed cheering up and was therefore with us. The two couples had become so close that they had just pooled their resources and bought a country place in New Jersey: the Moores were going to live in the old farm house, the Russells were converting its barn. This venture was the summer’s big excitement.

  I was there for three or four days which were as enjoyable as our times together always were. On one of the days Jean took over the kitchen and cooked a supremely delicious shrimp dish, for which she was famous, and on another day she and Brian had to make the long drive to the new property, to sort something out with the builders, so Jackie and I made an outing to Sag Harbor. On my last day, as we were all strolling to the beach, Jackie and ten-year-old Michael leading the way, I caught myself thinking ‘Perhaps darling Jackie is letting her indifference to appearance go a bit far’. Like Brian, she was fat, and she had recently become fatter – her ragged old denim shorts were too tight. And she had been neglecting her roughly blonded hair, which looked chopped rather than cut and was stiff from sea-bathing so that it stuck out like straw. When you couldn’t see her vivid face and the brightness of her hazel eyes, you noticed that she was looking a mess. I don’t recall making the comparison, but the always remarkable and apparently effortless physical elegance of Jean, who was walking beside me, may well have triggered the thought.

  It was, however, a passing one: something which I would not have remembered if I had not received a letter from Jackie about a month later, telling me that Brian and Jean had run away together.

  My first reaction was a shock of shame at my own obtuseness. Did I not pride myself on being a shrewd observer of people’s behaviour? How could I possibly have registered no more than that one tiny flicker of foreboding, and then dismissed it? So much for perceptiveness! And so much for Brian’s detestation of romantic passion!

  My next, and enduring, reaction was one of acute consternation on Jackie’s behalf. She, too, had failed to pick up any hint of what was going on. She had made her discovery through some cliché of marital disaster such as finding a note in a pocket when sending a jacket to the cleaner. Trying not to be entirely sure of its implications, she had asked Brian for an explanation: out it all came, and off they went. She was still in shock when she wrote, and all my feelings of sympathy were for her and Michael.

  It was only for a few days, however, that I felt Brian to have transmogrified into a villain. It did seem extraordinary that he and Jean had been prepared to continue with the property-sharing plan once they had fallen in love, abandoning it only on being discovered. That was what it looked like then, to both Jackie and me. Later it occurred to me that they might well have been less cold-blooded towards Frank and Jackie than they seemed: that they might not have realized how irresistible their passion had become until that day they spent together ‘sorting things out with the builders’, or even after that. But even while I was still being shocked by their ruthlessness, I knew that falling in love happens, and once it has happened it can’t be undone. And I also acknowledged that I and their other friends must have been wrong in seeing the partnership between Brian and Jackie as cloudless. Little though he had shown it, he must have been finding it oppressive for some time. It is absurd for anyone to believe himself aware of the ins and outs of other people’s relationships, so it was absurd to blame Brian for finding in Jean something which he needed, and which Jackie could not give. (That he had done so was true, and remained true for the rest of his life.)

  So I expected soon to emerge from total dismay at the Moores’ break-up, and to see Brian again as himself. But for the moment the person I couldn’t stop thinking about was Jackie. She had not wanted anything from the marriage that it didn’t give her: she had been as proud of Brian as a writer as she had been happy with him as a companion, and now all that was gone. Ahead of her stretched emptiness; above and below and within and without was the horrible miasma of the humiliation which comes from rejection. Then there was the anxiety of how to bring Michael through this debacle – and, for that matter, of how he and she were going to manage on their own … if ever anyone deserved sympathy, she did. Whereas Brian had seen what he wanted and had taken it, while remaining perfectly secure in the part of his own territory that was most important to him: his writing. No one need feel sorry for Brian. So it was Jackie I wanted to support, which meant writing to her often; whereas if I wrote to Brian, I wouldn’t know what to say.

  I ought, therefore, to have kept silent, but I did not. On getting a brief note giving me an address for him (whether this came from him or his agent I can’t remember), I answered it almost as briefly, saying that although I was sure that we would soon be back on our old footing, for the present I was feeling for Jackie so strongly that I would prefer it if he and I confined ourselves to business matters.

  How I regret not keeping his reply; because its strangeness is far from being communicable by description. I did not keep it because, having shown it to André, I wanted never to see it again.

  It began disagreeably but rationally: there would be no business letters because there would be no further business. He had been displeased for some time by our failure to advertise his books properly, so now he was finding a new publisher. Upsetting, b
ut sensible: if the letter had ended there we would have come back with some kind of undertaking to improve our performance, and if that had failed to mollify him André would have written him off as an example of the greed and folly of authors, and I would have known sadly that we had lost him through our own fault. But the letter did not end there. It went on for another page and a half, and what it said, in what appeared to be a fever of self-righteous spite against the woman he had dumped, was that I had sided with Jackie, and no one who had done that could remain his friend. The tone of that letter left André as shocked as it left me: so shocked that Brian’s was the only departure from our list that he made no attempt to prevent.

  Mordecai told me at the time that other friends of the Moores had been taken aback by this ‘He who is not with me is against me’ attitude, which made it seem all the more extraordinary. I had never encountered what I now know to be quite a common phenomenon: a person who has smashed a partnership trying to shift the whole blame for the break onto the one he or she has abandoned. It is natural, I suppose, to recoil from guilt – especially so, perhaps, in someone who was raised, as Brian was, to have a sharp sense of sin. But I still think that such a blind determination to have your omelette without breaking your eggs is ugly – and stupid, too – and this first example of it to come my way seemed impossible to believe. And it still seems nearly so. That Brian, with his wonderfully benign relish for human follies and failings, should have flumped into gross self-deception in this way … It seemed that I was losing him twice over, first as my friend (and that was very painful), then as himself. That letter could not have been written by the man I had thought Brian to be.

  It often happens in old age that when one looks back on events which once seemed amazing, they now seem explicable and even commonplace: a depressing consequence of responses made blunt by the passing of time. Perhaps I should be grateful to Brian for having done something which still gives me a jab of genuine dismay.

  Jackie is dead. For a time it looked as though the story, for her, had taken an astonishingly happy turn – and a comic one, into the bargain. She and Franklin Russell, left with the task of sorting out the shared-property plan, became closer friends than ever, had an affair – and ended up married. She was not a spiteful person. I never heard her say a word against Brian stronger than an expression of puzzlement. But she did evidently enjoy telling me, just once, that in fact Frank had been quite glad to get rid of Jean. I got the impression that she was comfortable with Frank in rather the same way that Brian had, to begin with, been comfortable with her when recovering from his passion for his drunken love. I stayed with them once in the New Jersey house (they had sold the barn), and saw them happy enough together to be dealing bravely with the first of the disasters which hit them: the fact that their son Alexander had been born with spina bifida. He had by then reached the end of a long chain of operations, and was an enchanting little boy who seemed to be as active and cheerful as any other child of his age; and the core of Jackie’s emotional life had obviously become her pride in him, and her happiness at having got him through to this state.

  Soon after that visit she went with Frank on one of his journeys – I think it was the first time they had felt that they could briefly leave Alexander in other hands. On that journey she fell ill, and when she got home the illness was diagnosed as cancer of the pancreas. She fought it gallantly and died cruelly.

  Frank and I did not know each other well enough to keep in touch, but I did run into him by chance about two years after her death. He had looked after her at home until the end and had been terribly shaken by what he had been through. I know that Michael Moore came together with his father after his mother’s death, but what has happened to Franklin and Alexander Russell I do not know.

  Although Brian’s departure from our list was more painful than any other, it has never prevented me from remembering the years when he was with us with pleasure; and it made a substantial and valuable contribution to many a subsequent gossip-fest. There was very much more gain than loss in having published him. And my regret at hardly ever seeing Mordecai since he made that sensible move in his career, though very real, is softened by being able to read his books and being proud that we were his first publisher. When I finished reading Barney’s Version I felt nothing but delight at his having so triumphantly outlived his first publishing house; and I am happy to end this chapter remembering that I once said to him ‘You are going to end up as a Grand Old Man of Canadian Literature’. That is exactly what he would have done, if it were possible for a Grand Old Man to be wholly without pomposity.

  JEAN RHYS

  NO ONE WHO has read Jean Rhys’s first four novels can suppose that she was good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was. I was introduced to the novels quite early in the fifties, by Francis Wyndham, who was one of their very few admirers at that time, and I started corresponding with her in 1957; but I didn’t meet her until 1964; and as a result I did almost nothing to help her during a long period of excruciating difficulty.

  It was not, perhaps, her very worst time. That must have been the last three years of the forties, when she and her third husband, Max Hamer, were living at Beckenham in Kent, their money had run out, and Max, a retired naval officer, became so desperate that he stumbled into deep trouble which ended in a three-year prison sentence for trying to obtain money by fraudulent means. During that nightmare Jean, paralysed by depression, could do nothing but drink herself into a state so bad that she, too, was several times in court and once in jail. By the time we were in touch Max had served his sentence, they had crept away to a series of miserable lodgings in Cornwall, and Jean was no longer quite at rock-bottom; but she still had nine terribly difficult years ahead of her before reemerging as a writer.

  She had always been a very private person, but she was known in literary circles when her fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, came out in 1939. When the war began a lot of people ‘disappeared’ in that they were carried away from their natural habitat on joining the forces or taking up war-work. Jean followed her second husband out of London, so when he died, and she slithered with Max into their misfortunes, she was no longer in touch with former acquaintances and became ‘lost’. Francis tried to find out what had happened to her and was told by one person that she had drowned herself in the Seine, by another that she had drunk herself to death. People expected that kind of fate for her.

  It was the BBC which found her, when they were preparing to broadcast an adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight made and performed by the actress Selma vaz Dias. They advertised for information about ‘the late Jean Rhys’, and she answered. Learning of this, Francis wrote to her, and she replied, saying that she was working on a new book. Responding to Francis’s and my enthusiasm, André Deutsch agreed that we should buy the option to see it – for £25.

  When people exclaim at how mean this was I no longer blush simply because I have blushed so often. I tell myself that the pound bought much more in the fifties than it does now, which is true; that this was not, after all, an advance, only an advance on an advance, which is true; and that no one else in those days would have paid much more for an option, and that, too, is true. But it is inconceivable that anyone would have paid less – so mean it was. If we had known anything about Jean’s circumstances I am sure that Francis and I would have fought for more, but it would be a long time before we gained any idea of them.

  The trouble was, she kept up a gallant front. In the letters we exchanged between 1957, when she said that her book would be finished in ‘six or nine months’, and March 1966, when she announced that it was finished, she would refer to being held up by domestic disasters such as leaking pipes, or mice in the kitchen, and she would make the disasters sound funny. Not until I met her did I understand that for Jean such incidents were appalling: they knocked her right out because her inability to cope with life’s practicalities went beyond anything I ever saw in anyone generally taken to be s
ane. Max’s health had given out, but her loyalty to him extended beyond keeping silent about his prison sentence to disguising his subsequent helplessness. It was years before I learnt how dreadful her seventies had been as she alternated between the struggle to nurse him and bleak loneliness when he was in hospital. She ate too little, drank too much, was frightened, exhausted and ill – and paranoid into the bargain, seeing the village of Cheriton FitzPaine (to which they moved during these years) as a cruel place. So any little horror on top of all this would incapacitate her for weeks. And when it passed a certain point she would crack.

  For example: she told me that neighbours were saying that she was a witch, and she told it lightly, so that I thought she was making a funny story out of some small incident. But Mr Woodward, the rector, was to say that indeed she had been so accused, and that anyone who thought such beliefs were extinct didn’t know Devon. Jean, driven frantic, had run out into the road and attacked the woman who originated the charge with a pair of scissors, which led to her being bundled for a week or so into a mental hospital. ‘And if you ask me,’ said Mr Greenslade, one of her few friends in the village, as he drove me from Exeter in his taxi, ‘it was the other one who ought to have been shut up, not poor Mrs Hamer.’ And not a word of all that appeared in her letters.